The One Straw Revolution

[midnight armadillo]

Has anyone read this book? I've read some of the Permaculture books by Bill Mollison and others, but I've only just come across this text by Masanobu Fukuoka, an 89 year-old Japanese farmer whose approach is very similar to permaculture.

I think I might try to score a used copy somewhere...

On edit: here's a review of the book. Quote:
By coming to understand the balancing nuances of his microenvironment, Mr. Fukuoka has achieved greater production with less labor that previously thought possible. Mandarin orange groves cover the slopes of his farm while rice and winter grains are sown in the fields. Vegetables are raised in small patches or grown in with white clover the predominant cover. His is a humid nearly tropical climate, but his precepts can be widely applied. The four principles of natural farming are: 1) no cultivation, 2) no chemical fertilizer or prepared compost, 3) no weeding, 4) no dependence on chemicals. He uses only uncut straw for mulch, thus the title. "Rice straw works well as a mulch for winter grain and the straw of winter grain works best for the rice." The secret here is that he composts his straw in the field for six months by covering with a thin layer of duck or chicken manure. Instead of hand planting rice seedlings in flooded fields of manure tea he broadcasts seed into the field, floods to an inch to curtail the clover while the rice gets established, and then drains off the field. He broadcasts his grains before the rice is harvested. New mandarin orange trees are never pruned. His yields are higher and his labor less that anywhere in Japan.

[OneBlueSky]

1. yeah, I read it years ago . . .

and likely still have a copy packed away somewhere . . . don't recall all that much except that I liked the book and the author's philosophy of life . . . would recommend it to anyone looking for a slightly different take on things . . .